The holiday period is over. There has been another attack on a Sydney synagogue with swastikas being painted on the walls. The perpetrators tried to set the place on fire, too. More and more it echoes the events in Germany in the nineteen thirties. It’s no surprise that anti-semitism has gathered pace since nothing was…
Time flies, doesn’t it? We’re already a week into 2025. In Australia that means we’re about halfway through the annual summer hiatus, where everything is on hold. All the TV shows are on holidays so you get endless repeats or ‘lifestyle’ programs like border security or real-time cop shows like RBT (random breath testing for…
Today we in Australia will experience the summer solstice – specifically, Saturday, 21 Dec 2024, 7:20 pm (approx) in Brisbane. It will be the longest day, with daylight for 13 hours and 41 minutes. At round about the same time, Europe will be enduring the winter solstice. London’s daylight hours will be 7 hours 49 minutes….
The international news has been full of two things of late – the final fall of Bashar Al Assad’s despicable regime in Syria and the shooting killing of the CEO of one of America’s largest (for profit) health insurance companies, United Healthcare (UHC). First, the murder of UHC CEO Brian Thompson. He was shot in…
Life goes on in the new house as we make changes to suit us. Peter has built some storage in our outdoor room, using flat packs from Bunnings, and we’ve done a bit more work in the garden. I suspect gardening will be intermittent for some time. The weather is not particularly hot, but it’s…
This time last weekend I was starting my low fibre diet in preparation for a colonoscopy the following Tuesday. The very worst part of having a colonoscopy is the preparation, cleaning out your intestines so the doctor can see what’s happening up there. Steamed white fish, steamed chicken breast, peeled white potatoes, white bread… at…
I’m pleased to announce that the new house now has solar hot water and solar panels. We enjoyed solar at our previous house and these days it’s even more important to be able to reduce power costs. Despite living in a country with an abundance of quality coal, natural gas, and uranium, household power prices…
It’s been about two months since we moved into our new home and started to appreciate the… what can I say?… inadequacies of the house. Down-sizing became real in ways we hadn’t anticipated. Still, we’ve done quite a bit in those eight weeks. I mentioned some before – new bathroom cupboards, new lounge because the…
Australia is a unique place. It’s the only place on Earth that is at the same time a country, a continent, and an island. And that last property has helped to make it a haven for monotremes, marsupials, and other weird critters. Europeans ‘discovered’ the Great South Land several times over the centuries, usually by…
One of the most disgraceful things anyone can do in life is teach small children to hate. Adolf Hitler and his henchmen understood this well. That’s why they created the Hitler Youth. So what do we make of the pro-Palestinian (sounds much nicer than ‘anti-Israeli’) protest at the University of Sydney? ‘In a clip from…